Women in Sales: Over-Performing but Underrepresented with Dr. Courtney McCashland

Tim Geisert:
Hey, welcome to the Selling Excellence Podcast for Business Executives. We all know B2B selling isn't getting any easier and, what's worse, it's getting more expensive. Hello, I'm Tim Geisert, your host and partner at AuctusIQ, a selling excellence as a service company. Our goal today is to give you insights on how you can turn your sales force into a company asset. We hope you enjoy.
You know, the whole idea behind this podcast is to bring insights to selling, as the introduction says. Today, we're going to be talking again with Courtney McCashland, my business partner, head of science and strategy, and a founder of the organization, but one thing... Just want to set the stage here for the audience, what we're going to be talking about. We're going to talk about women in sales. This is something you've been studying, and very interesting findings, so today, that's what we're going to be about.
But before we get into that, let's just build a little bit of character development here, Courtney. Tell us a little bit about your background in predictive analytics, and then we'll talk about the women in sales thing.

Courtney McCashland:
Perfect. What led me into predictive analytics was I've always been fascinated about what makes people great in their job. Really early in my career, I learned you can actually measure the things that differentiate high performers.

Tim Geisert:
Sure, yep.

Courtney McCashland:
There's patterns of behavior that are consistent on people who are really successful in a certain role, and there's very specific competencies and skills, so just really got fascinated in what do you need to do to do that. I went and really drilled down on how can I get at those patterns, and what's most critical in certain jobs?

Tim Geisert:
Right, right.

Courtney McCashland:
More recently, in the last 10 years, I've been working on what matters most in sales and sales leadership. We've gotten underneath. We've figured out, if you ask the right questions, people actually tell you what you need to know, and you'll find that you can learn that some people that are really successful and bring what you need for the job answer differently. That's all of our database has been looking at what do you bring? Do you perform? And what explains the success of the high performers?

Tim Geisert:
One of the things I love about you and what you do as a craft is you just have this natural curiosity. It's like, what can this tell us? What can the data say, right?

Courtney McCashland:
Right.

Tim Geisert:
That kind of leads to then, okay, what did you see in the data around women in sales? Where did that take you? And how'd you get going on this?

Courtney McCashland:
We'd seen there's huge differences between high performers and low performers, so the question we asked is are there differences between women and men on these same profiles?

Tim Geisert:
Oh sure, yeah. Sure.

Courtney McCashland:
One of the things that we thought is we figured, in most areas, in terms of the workforce, we've seen a huge trend is there's a higher, a greater proportion of women in the sales force or in the workforce, but that's not the case in sales. In sales, we found that, actually, for the last 10 years, if you look nationally, only 30% of the individuals in sales and sales leadership roles are women.

Tim Geisert:
That's really astounding. You would think that the buzz in the marketplace would say it's greater than that, only 30%.

Courtney McCashland:
Right.

Tim Geisert:
Wow. So, why are they underrepresented, in your opinion?

Courtney McCashland:
Well, we thought maybe there was something different about the profile. We tore it apart, right?

Tim Geisert:
Okay, right.

Courtney McCashland:
We looked first at our database, because we have more than a million two people in the database, so we said, "Okay, let's look at the whole database, look across the database, and see if there's differences." The reality is the mean average across those profiles for the high performers, middle performers, low performers, between men and women, there's no differences, except for one area. We found a little difference that women actually outperform men in some of the competencies, but overall, if you look at consistently on that match index for each role, there are no differences in gender at all.

Tim Geisert:
Did that surprise you?

Courtney McCashland:
You know, I think we have this bias that some people are going to be better at certain jobs-

Tim Geisert:
Sure, right.

Courtney McCashland:
Because of this historic role perspective.

Tim Geisert:
Right.

Courtney McCashland:
You might think that men have more courage than women or men are more competitive, but the reality is, when you really break down what's inside an individual, that's not the case. It's just that we all have learned through our history that there are certain kinds of roles we're used to seeing people play. That's kind of what we anticipate we're going to see when we look at the data.

Tim Geisert:
That's really fascinating because, okay, first of all, key finding number one, right?

Courtney McCashland:
Right.

Tim Geisert:
There's no difference really.

Courtney McCashland:
Right. Really, no-

Tim Geisert:
When you break down the talents and competencies within the database-

Courtney McCashland:
Between genders.

Tim Geisert:
What explains success for women is the same for what explains success for men, right?

Courtney McCashland:
Right.

Tim Geisert:
Okay, all right. So then, what else did you learn? Where else did your curiosity take you?

Courtney McCashland:
You're always going to see individual differences within each dataset, but the thing that we wanted to understand was, underneath, why is it that women aren't more represented in sales-

Tim Geisert:
So, the why behind it, right?

Courtney McCashland:
When women, when really, if you look at it, women are just as likely to succeed in sales across a large sample, right?

Tim Geisert:
Yeah.

Courtney McCashland:
So what is it, then, that's causing women not to show up more frequently in a sales force? What we did is we took 50 individuals from our database, who were just top performers and had been really, really successful, to understand why did you get into sales? What has made you successful? We found two things in the trend.

Tim Geisert:
Hold on just a second. Your curiosity took you down a path going let's understand this why by not just crunching the data, but asking successful women in the profession.

Courtney McCashland:
Right. We did in-depth interviews. Right.

Tim Geisert:
50 of them, you say.

Courtney McCashland:
Correct.

Tim Geisert:
Okay, all right. Then that's how you're starting to get to the why. Okay, what'd you find out? This sounds interesting.

Courtney McCashland:
Yeah, so we were trying to understand what's going underneath.

Tim Geisert:
All right.

Courtney McCashland:
There's two things that came out that were just really fascinating. One is that women in the... All 50 of them had not initially thought they'd be good at sales. They didn't go into sales saying, "Hey, I want to become a salesperson." Somebody either, one, drew them out and said, "Hey, you've got what it takes; you should go and apply for this job," or said, "You know, you might be good in sales; have you ever considered it?" or they had some event, some catalyst. One woman, who had been in a war, came over, and she needed to support her kids, and she was single. She knew, "I've got to figure it out, and I know I can sell," and she went and just made it happen.

Tim Geisert:
She rose to the occasion of some sort of challenge in front of them.

Courtney McCashland:
Yes, challenge. It's either somebody kind of drew me out, invited me to sell, or I had a catalyst event. It wasn't-

Tim Geisert:
That's really interesting.

Courtney McCashland:
None of them just said, "Grew up, when I was a little kid, I wanted to go into sales." We heard zero, right? One is there was a catalyst event.

Tim Geisert:
Okay.

Courtney McCashland:
The second thing we learned about these women is they all had a superpower. They had something that let them rise up and show up in sales, so either a really deep expertise in an area like finance or in a core thing that they were selling. They just were really a critical subject matter expertise, or they drilled down in some of the things that you need, the competencies you need to either be in sales or lead a sales team. They had just perfected that at a point where they just differentiated through it. We just saw that on every single person who had shown up in that data file.

Tim Geisert:
That's really interesting. There was some sort of catalyst, whether they were plucked by someone to say, "You're good at this," or something happened in their life personally, right? Many times.

Courtney McCashland:
Yes, personally.

Tim Geisert:
Or it just led down this pathway to they had a superpower. They had some...

Courtney McCashland:
Yep, yep.

Tim Geisert:
That's really interesting. Okay, so as you're learning your way through the understanding of this, what else did you learn? What other key things did you find or your curiosity take you?

Courtney McCashland:
Remember, our database is unique in that we not only know what does a profile look like of the high performers, we know what differentiates. For every question, talent, competency, we can see what are different about the best, so we decided let's look at only the high performing women. We found out the thing they had, if you compared them to their high performing male counterparts, they were much higher in some of the very specific competencies that you need to master, in terms of proficiency, so it's like they work the-

Tim Geisert:
By the profession or by job or by the role? How did you really look at that?

Courtney McCashland:
We looked at the sales leaders and we looked at the sellers. We saw the difference is bigger at the leader level.

Tim Geisert:
Okay, wow.

Courtney McCashland:
Okay, so really individuals who can deliver exceptional results through their team, women who do that, their competency for how they learn to do that is higher than men. In looking at some of these areas, the things that you learn, the hypothesis is that, because we don't always think of women in sales, because maybe if you think about someone in sales, just like any role, you kind of get someone in your head, and you haven't seen as many people in sales and sales leadership.

Tim Geisert:
Yeah, our cultural norms kind of take us there, right?

Courtney McCashland:
Yeah. Those women, to cut through, had to volunteer, or someone had to help them get into the opportunity, so to apply for the job or be considered or take the class.

Tim Geisert:
Mm-hmm.

Courtney McCashland:
Then, the second thing is, to stand out, to actually get into a good opportunity where they were invited to do this or were promoted, basically, they had to shine someplace, some way that people were like, "Oh yeah, she's really good. She showed up. She had the outcome," or, "She showed up in a meeting," or was able to do X, Y, or Z. I think these women have had to kind of, just like when you're getting into med school or something, that the criteria was high, so they had to meet that criteria to get over that hurdle that you need and that unconscious bias, to kind of cut through and show they could do it.

Tim Geisert:
That's really fascinating. As you think about where this takes us, I mean, help the audience really understand, okay, what do we do about this? What are some of the things that really... We take this data, what you've learned, both the qualitative in those interviews and in crunching the data within our database, where do we take this? What's your advice? What's your... I mean, Dr. Courtney McCashland, what would you tell the audience that we should do?

Courtney McCashland:
Well, there's two things. One is how do you help close the gap, right? Because in your own organization, being aware that women could be, they have just as much potential to be great at selling as men, so you shouldn't have in your head that there's only one individual, so-

Tim Geisert:
So, in other words, set that bias aside.

Courtney McCashland:
Set that bias aside. The second thing, though, is we've got to have a way to get outside of... If women aren't applying to the job, how do we get to a new... How do we source talent, so that we can get both genders applying, basically? The way you do that is you need to know who has capacity to sell, so you have to have a tool that's fair and equitable that you can use that measures, which is what we do, the talents and competencies, that you can just go to some of those, maybe, those pools that you haven't gone to before, or maybe you go to your engineers and your service people in your same company and say, "Who might have some sales talent?" Then you just need to skill them up on the gap areas, so that you can get them to performance faster.
The interesting thing is, if you look in your company today... This is what really floored me because since, every time we go to a company, we have performance data on every individual in a large sales organization, and we have women and men, and we can look at it.

Tim Geisert:
Right, right.

Courtney McCashland:
Recently, we did a study, and the opportunity for you, if you can find these women, is just economically astronomical. I just want to share three studies. I think I told you I wanted to share these.

Tim Geisert:
Yep, yep.

Courtney McCashland:
I brought my glasses, just so I can [inaudible 00:10:41].

Tim Geisert:
Put your glasses and read from the document. Just-

Courtney McCashland:
These are three of the global studies we did recently. When we had this data, we hadn't looked at it this way before, but it was kind of interesting. One was a global technology business, and what we found is that, of the whole sales organization, only 10% of the people in the roles were female. This is a big global company.

Tim Geisert:
So, even lower than the 30%.

Courtney McCashland:
Only 10% were female. We looked at what's the difference between them, the men and women, and actually the 10% who were female actually had annual revenue that was 89% higher than their male counterpart.

Tim Geisert:
Say that again, 89?

Courtney McCashland:
89% higher than their male counterpart, so this is a very small population, but they were doing better. In year two, same population, we had two years of data, 132% higher than their male counterpart.
Two other studies very similar findings. The fintech company only had 16% representation of women. For them, we had 84% higher quota attainment. All of these are looking at different metrics. What we're finding is the women are not very well represented, but the women who did get in, who made it over the hurdle are performing better.

Tim Geisert:
They really show up, don't they?

Courtney McCashland:
The last one is a global manufacturing. Only 22% of the whole global sales force were women, and of those women, the females averaged 114% quota attainment, where the males averaged 109% quota attainment.

Tim Geisert:
We've talked about this on other podcasts about how sometimes you had that head fake of someone's resume or someone's background or whatever those... Maybe what you're talking about, the head fake of a cultural bias, setting all those aside and really looking at the data, really.

Courtney McCashland:
Right.

Tim Geisert:
Because what you're talking about is really understanding those talents and competencies of the individual.

Courtney McCashland:
Yes.

Tim Geisert:
Not the gender factor involved in here, because what you're saying is, boy, there's a real upside here, to look first at the data.

Courtney McCashland:
Yeah, in fact, the net of the whole thing is that if you look at individual differences, there are individual differences that help people succeed in sales and sales leadership, and you can get at what are the talents and competencies that, if you have them, you're likely to be successful? But it's not about being male or female. It's just about getting at the stuff inside and knowing who has the potential and developing where they go.

Tim Geisert:
That's right. Getting to the inside character, the abilities of the individual.

Courtney McCashland:
Yeah.

Tim Geisert:
Courtney, this is freaking fantastic stuff. I mean, this podcast is all about providing insights. Man, you brought a bunch to the table today, so thank you. Keep up the good work. Keep up the curiosity.

Courtney McCashland:
All right, thank you.

Tim Geisert:
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Selling Excellence Podcast for Business Executives. I hope you gained some insight on how to help turn your sales organization into a company asset. Don't forget to subscribe to the Sales Excellence Podcast wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on AuctusIQ or to schedule a discovery call, visit our website at auctusiq.com. Until next time, this is Tim Geisert, your host and partner at AuctusIQ, here to help you sell more and grow your company.

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